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I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Collaboration When Developing Spring Boot Microservices by Dan Erez @ Spring I/O 2022

- At about 11 minutes in you can hear me qualify myself as "oldest man in the audience" by virtue of knowing Zuul from the original Ghostbusters movie. - Read more

GitLive – Real-time Code Collaboration

Continuing on last week's subject of better collaboration and knowledge sharing in software development (with CodeStream, in that case) I'd like to share GitLive - a new, promising tool I've come across. GitLive allows you and your fellow team members to collaborate on code in real time right in your IDE thereby turning it "into a collaborative space". What I've seen so far looks intriguing. I think that we'll be moving into that direction more rapidly and that we'll see more tools of ... Read more

CodeStream – Code as a Knowledge Base

CodeStream is a code review tool that allows you to conduct such reviews right in your IDE, i.e. without changing context. According to their master plan CodeStream is supposed to "Provide the ability to talk about any block of code, on any branch, in any state [...]" "Eliminate context switching costs [...]" "Treat codeblocks as a first-class object [...]" in order to allow developers, both new and senior ones, to quickly get up to speed with an existing codebase and to collaborate and draw upon each ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: tmate – Instant terminal sharing

While there are quite a few options for collaborating visually in a remote work setting and remote desktop solutions are ten a penny there are surprisingly few options for instant live collaboration in text-based environments, i.e. terminals or command-line interfaces. One such option for instant terminal sharing is tmate. tmate for instance allows you to have remote pair programming sessions via the terminal or work collaboratively on a command-line interface. It achieves this by returning a connection string such as ssh [email protected]. This ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Whiteboards With Google Jamboard

Two weeks ago I wrote about working collaboratively on digital whiteboards with Miro. Since 2017 Google has been selling competitively priced digital whiteboard hardware under its Jamboard brand. Alongside that hardware product, however, with Google Jamboard there's a companion software product of the same name as part of Google's G Suite collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools. Although Jamboard, the software, isn't widely promoted as an independent software product it works perfectly fine as a browser app without the Jamboard hardware. While not ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Appointment Scheduling With Calendly

Calendly is an online appointment scheduling tool that allows you, your team, or your entire organisation to flexibly schedule meetings. As a user you can define available time slots and allow others to schedule meetings according to these time slots. Calendly taps into your usual online calendar tool (e.g. Google Calendar, Office 365 / Outlook, or iCloud). Instead of the usual back and forth though that commonly happens when trying to agree on an exact time and date for an appointment Calendly ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Whiteboards With Miro

Miro is a collaborative whiteboard software that's ideal for exploring ideas and concepts in a distributed work setting. Much like a physical whiteboard it lends itself to ideation, brainstorming, design and planning sessions, i.e. work where the structure and nature of the outcome isn't necessarily known beforehand but rather freeform and loosely structured and the process by which these results are generated isn't particularly rigid. Miro provides the user with elements and tools such as sticky notes, freeform drawing, mind maps, grids, and ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Interactive Presentations With Mentimeter

Continuing on my recent theme of remote team collaboration tools, today I'd like to suggest Mentimeter. Mentimeter is an interactive online presentation tool that allows you to engage with and gather feedback from meeting attendees, workshop participants, or team mates. Where with ordinary presentation tools your captive audience can just watch and listen, Mentimenter enables event organisers to collect feedback, keep everyone engaged, and make sure everyone's voice is heard. In addition to the ordinary content slides one would expect from presentation software, ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Presentify

In the last two weeks I wrote about Zappy and Loom - tools that help you with sharing information, documenting work and collaborating visually in remote or distributed work settings. Continuing with this general theme, today I'd like to suggest another, similar tool: Presentify (Mac App Store) is macOS menu bar app that allows you to annotate any screen or highlight your cursor, no matter the context or app you're in. This makes Presentify a general-purpose presentation and teaching tool that's ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Loom – Screen & Video Recording Software

Last week I wrote about Zappy by Zapier, a tool for visually documenting and sharing your work and your underlying processes. Loom is a similar tool that - by going beyond mere screenshots with actual screen recordings - allows your team to collaborate remotely and asynchronously. From explaining and reviewing code to design critiques, customer support, sales, and employee feedback there are a variety of use cases such a tool can you help you with when it comes to efficiently organising distributed work ... Read more
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